Are you making these major mistakes on your website? If you are, it’s costing you clients.
The vast majority of your potential clients will meet you through your website, so it’s your site that makes the first impression. It’s imperative that you make a good one. Despite the importance of the website, many law firms fall into the same traps. What follows is a list of these most common pitfalls that you can avoid while building your digital front desk.
Unattractive, Outdated Design
As with everything else in this world, web design aesthetics are connected to evolving trends. What looks cutting edge one year can look hopelessly dated the next. For the same reason you wouldn’t decorate your physical office with avocado shag carpeting and lava lamps, you don’t want your site looking like a Geocities creation in 1997.
Luckily for you, web design has a few guidelines that have stayed modern and attractive since they were created. Elegant minimalist design never goes out of style, and if done properly, will help your load times and SEO. Details as simple as background color, with light outperforming dark, can cause measurable differences in performance.
Clutter
A cluttered site is often the result of going too long before a comprehensive glow-up. The site accumulates bells and whistles, and soon becomes a slow-loading, unappealing mess. Embracing the elegance of minimalism helps ensure your visitors go where you want them to.
Always keep your page’s purpose in mind: the generation of leads. Imagine the path a standard visitor has taken. They have found you via an organic search or digital advertisement and you want to get from that moment to them submitting a lead you can act on. The more clutter between them and that, the more likely they are to leave your site without submitting a lead.
With only the essentials, your potential clients will have an easier time getting the information they came for and you increase your chances of converting them into a lead.
Poor User Experience
Clutter is often a cause and a symptom of this problem; but it is far from the only one. Your site is the gateway to your practice. Your goal is to ensure that gateway is wide open.
In practice, your CTAs should be placed prominently, with a button marked something like “schedule your free consultation,” with contrasting colors and font sizes to draw the eye. Your goal is to get your visitors to click that button and fill in the form they find on the other side. Everything else is secondary to that primary goal.
Creating a user experience around that goal means not only a modern and minimalist design as per 1, absent clutter as per 2, but also includes answers to questions your potential clients might have. Determine the information they need and make it easy for them to find.
Clean, elegant web design makes your website attractive and easy to navigate, boosting your chances of generating a new lead.
Slow Loading Speed
One of the reasons that minimalist design is so important is load speed. Sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load shed most of their traffic as website visitors move to greener pastures. You’ve probably experienced leaving a slow-loading site while browsing, and chances are, you left it.
Thanks to the importance of load speed in retaining traffic, search engines have gotten proactive and factored it in when assigning search rankings. This means that if your site takes forever to load, not only are you losing those people who clicked on it, you’re losing the opportunity for people to even to find it. You can test your website at Page Speed Insights to see your current scores.
Because site speed is such a critical component of your web presence, all Lead Science websites are optimized for performance. Our platform prioritizes speed to ensure visitors can quickly and easily navigate your website.
Check your site speed at Page Speed Insights to ensure your website is loading quickly for your visitors.
No SEO Strategy
Every element of your site depends on it being seen. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of getting your site prioritized by search engines. The better your SEO, the higher you end up in organic searches.
Lead generation starts with SEO, and even more importantly, local SEO. Since the bulk of your business is going to come from clients in your general area, local SEO is what you need to excel at. For whatever reason, many firms and even digital marketers will ignore or underemphasize local SEO, when it should be considered a cornerstone of your overall strategy.
When your business leverages the power of local SEO, you gain huge advantages in the battle to reach potential clients in your local market:
- Increased visibility: Quality local SEO means you are far more likely to be seen by potential clients. This is half the battle, as most Google users only spend about 60 seconds looking at SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) before clicking on a link. Search visibility is a huge advantage that translates directly into clicks and website conversions.
- More high-quality cases: Attracting leads is the primary purpose of your website, but not all leads are created equal. The higher you appear on SERPs, the more likely you are not only to attract quality, winnable cases, but to have your pick over the ones you do attract. Users actively looking for help are far more likely to click on a site high up on SERPs.
- Increased credibility: Because Google and other search engines tie a site’s ranking on a SERP to its authority, trustworthiness, and overall value, users will as well. A law firm appearing high on a SERP is seen as a tacit endorsement, and such rankings will increase a firm’s credibility as well as perceived authority.
Partnering with a team of SEO experts like ours at Lead Science is your best path to increasing your local search rankings. Schedule your discovery call today to learn about the benefits of a comprehensive local SEO strategy.
Lack of Quality Content
The internet runs on content, regardless of its specific form. You need to feed that desire for content with a blog, podcast, video series, or some other form. While the form of your content is negotiable, quality is not. If it’s going to drive traffic, your content needs to be informative and entertaining. Don’t worry; the more you create, the better you get at it.
The first purpose your content serves is to create authority for your law firm. Clients want to know they can entrust you with their stressful life event. When they can come to your content for answers to their legal questions, you will inevitably earn their trust. Additionally, you can gain an audience that acts as word-of-mouth for your firm. Someone who has gained valuable insight from your content is likely to recommend you to a friend who could use your services.
Lastly, content is a driver for SEO. Search engines like content that is both high quality and regularly updated and will prioritize sites that meet those standards. While content creation can feel like a whole other obligation you don’t need, it is in fact a huge part of your lead generation strategy.
Hard-to-find Contact Information
Not every visitor is going to want to fill out a form. Some prefer the old fashioned way of contact by phone call. For those people, you need to have your contact information easy to find.
You’ll need a dedicated page with your contact information, but more importantly, you should keep your phone number in the header navigation section of your website. That way, no matter where your visitors are on your site, they’ll have easy access to your phone number.
One great way to make sure your phone number is always one click away is by utilizing persistent headers (also known as “sticky headers”) on your website. These enable your navigation and phone number to stick to the top of your browser while your website visitors scroll down a page.
Lead Science utilizes persistent headers to keep your most important contact info in front of site visitors at all times.
Weak Security
Security is an important but often overlooked component in lead generation. Lead generation forms are going to ask for some identifying information including name and contact info, and you need potential clients to feel secure that their data is safe in your hands. The more secure they feel, both in the precautions you take and your track record, the more likely they are to submit a lead.
You must ensure your website provider uses a secure HTTPS protocol. You can tell if your site is using HTTPS by checking your url at the top of most web browsers. If you see a lock or “HTTPS” before the url, then your site is using HTTPS.
Using the HTTPS protocol is extremely important because if your site is not secure, Chrome and many other browsers will issue a warning to the site visitor telling them your website is not secure. That is a major red flag for website visitors and will cause the majority to abandon your site.
At Lead Science, we provide all of our clients with the most secure, HTTPS enabled websites available. We prioritize the security of your data and regularly update our platform with the latest web security measures.
Lack of Social Media Integration
While the top social media platforms are subject to change, social media is here to stay. For a law firm, it offers a unique advertising platform that meets clients where they are and can be operated effectively, even on a shoestring budget.
Your goal is to create a truly seamless experience for your users. If a potential client clicks on a Facebook post, it should lead, without difficulty, to every corner of your digital presence. Funneling social media posts to your home page and from there to your lead generation form is the name of the game.
Conversely, you should encourage your website visitors to follow you on your social channels by adding “Follow” and “Share” buttons to your website and content. This will help you expand your audience on social media and drive more traffic back to your website.
Your social channels and website work together by bringing in new site visitors and growing your audience.
Create an Unbeatable Web Presence With Lead Science
These and many more problems plague the websites of many law firms. At Lead Science, our proprietary platform takes the guesswork out of website design, giving you an attractive, professional digital front desk that generates the leads you need to thrive. We bolster our techniques with extensive performance testing that keeps our sites client-friendly and optimized for lead generation.
With a Lead Science website, you will attract more website visitors and convert them into new leads for your law firm:
- You’ll receive a secure, attractive, high-performance new website optimized for lead generation. Our sites are the fastest in the industry and go through a rigorous testing process to ensure your website visitors receive an unforgettable experience.
- Get an edge over your competition with the powerful search capabilities of the Lead Science platform. Designed to increase web traffic from your local market by utilizing structured data and advanced SEO techniques, our platform will help your website win the battle for search dominance.
- Gain access to advanced performance analytics and unparalleled support. Our team of experts will partner with you on every step of your lead generation journey, offering comprehensive reporting and award-winning customer experience.
Schedule your Lead Science discovery call today. We can supercharge your lead generation with a high-performance website that will delight your visitors and grow your business.
